dde

Command

The dde command allows you to communicate with DDE servers.
Several parameters are always required to perform a DDE operation.
The name of the server is always required. For example, PROGMAN
is the DDE server name of the Program Manager.
A topic is also required.
Some servers may ignore the topic, others may require it in the same way as
the server name; however, normally there is a set of valid topics.
dde can perform two types of operations:
request the value of a data item or execute a command string.

specifies, in milli-seconds, the timeout during which the DDE server must
respond.
Default is 5000 milli-seconds, that is 5 seconds.

-x

displays, for data requests only, the returned values in hexadecimal.
Each byte is displayed as two hex digits, separated by a space.
Normal return from the -r is to display the data returned
as a string.

The following brings up the startup program group.
Note that the Explorer and the old Program Manager both have the same DDE
server name, PROGMAN.

dde -s PROGMAN -t PROGMAN -c '[ShowGroup("Startup", 1)]'

Look up in the Windows Registry Database the name of the browser installed
on the current machine, as well as the name of the Topic which causes it to
open a given URL.
Normally the browser is either Netscape, or IExplore,
and normally the topic is WWW_OpenURL.
This command takes a URL as the item requested.
It returns a 4 byte binary number being the browser window ID which was
opened for that topic.